On my way to the car in the morning I see that the fox has once again broken into our bin. I say “broken into” but he’s just figured out how to unlock it by lifting the handle. I personally oversee its locking every night, and every morning I find it upside down and empty.
I count myself lucky for two reasons: I’ve just learned that our neighbour woke up last week to find the fox in his bedroom; and I’m going away for the weekend. The band I’m in has two gigs in Devon, so for two nights the fox and the bin will not be my problem.
Instead I will exchange them for other problems, which begin shortly after I pick up the fiddle player at his house. My phone indicates our journey will take about four hours; the fiddler player’s phone claims it will take five hours and 30 minutes.
“How can that be?” I say. “It’s the same app.”
“Wait,” he says. “I have another app.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say.
“OK, this one is saying three hours and 46 minutes.”
“Ooh,” I say. “I think we should go with that one. We’ll be early!”
While it would be fair to say I don’t understand how satellite navigation software works, it’s clear that this is not how it works. You cannot simply accept the best offer. An hour into our journey, all the apps adjust their estimates to converge on a single, bleak future. We are driving, they suggest, straight into the pit of hell. Most of the apps advise us to leave the M4 immediately. The dissenting app offers only despair as an alternative.
“I’m getting off here,” I say, sailing over two lanes to the exit. At the roundabout we take the first left, and commence picking our way south and west along roads with grass growing in the middle. The fiddle player juggles options as our arrival time recedes.
“Sharp right coming up, after those trees,” he says. We turn on to a shaded lane, heading uphill as the hedges scrape both wing mirrors.
“Is this for cars?” I say.
In the end the journey is closer to six hours, which means we arrive not just weary and frazzled, but late. The soundcheck is already under way, and eating into the soundcheck of the band that’s on before us, with the actual stage times closing in. I used to worry a lot when this happened until I realised: this never doesn’t happen.
The first gig is a private party. We don’t often do them, because generally you’re only guaranteed one audience member who likes you – the person who hired you. Everybody else is just there for a party. The possibility of winning over such an audience presents an intriguing challenge, but it’s just as likely we will simply bewilder them.
Our expectations are exceeded. More than one person likes us, and several come up afterward to say so.
It’s only a 45-minute drive to where we’re staying, plus a further 45 minutes to the next gig the next day. We are early, but the soundcheck still overruns, eating into the soundcheck of the band that’s on before us, and the band that’s on before them. Like always.
This gig is a ticketed event, so we’re presuming a certain amount of goodwill on the part of the audience, or at least informed consent. What I am not expecting is a front row that knows all the words to the seventh song in.
“I don’t even know all the words to that song,” I say to the fiddle player early the next morning. “And I wrote it.”
“It must have been very gratifying,” he says. We are sitting in the car, consulting our phones.
“It was certainly handy,” I say. “My app says three hours, 29 minutes.”
“Mine says four hours 42,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “We go with mine.”
We split the difference – four hours later I am unloading my car at home. The bin is undisturbed. The middle one is watching TV.
“Anything weird happen while I was gone?” I say.
“When I came downstairs this morning,” he says, “I found the cat on the mat by the front door playing with a squirrel with no head,” he says.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“A huge squirrel with no head.”
“That cat couldn’t behead a squirrel,” I say. “It must have been the fox.”
“I was like, I hope you ate the head, cos I don’t want to find it anywhere,” he says.
“Did you get rid of it?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I had to wear bin liners on both arms.”
I think: I’m glad I didn’t get here any earlier.
